The trite stuff. (Cliches refreshed.)

WASHINGTON, DC: In addition to nitpicking my column to death every week, Tom the Butcher also does freelance editing, so he sees a lot of manuscripts. Some of them are from elegant writers; some are, to put it mildly, not. Without naming names, Tom occasionally shares with me a particularly egregious paragraph or two from his inbox. A recent one, from an attempted serious novel, read something like this:

Evan heaved a sigh of relief. Yes, all hell had broken loose and his dream had turned into a nightmare, putting him on an emotional roller coaster. But in the wake of recent developments, there was a ray of hope, and a chance for cautious optimism.

The rampant use of cliches is a reliable mark of the hack writer, a person who either hasn’t heard of or has chosen to ignore the classic wry writerly advice: “Avoid cliches like the plague.”

It’s not always easy. What’s particularly insidious about cliches is that there is a good reason they beckon us: They come easily to mind, and, if they were original, would usually be very good writing. They became cliches in the first place because people liked and remembered them.

Maybe what we need to do is to accept that cliches will always be with us, but refresh them every few years so they don’t sound so tired: Create original, modernized expressions to mean the same thing. When they become cliches, repeat the process.